As is known, with the increasing spread of new services that make use of wide-bandwidth connections and have their point of utilization in the home network, there is a pressing need for simultaneous applications to coexist, sharing the same resources, at the quality declared by the service provider and undersigned by the customer. This need is markedly felt not only because it responds to the requirements of the customer of exploiting to the full the potential of the wide-bandwidth connection that the customer has purchased, but also, on the operator side, because it represents an unrenounceable requirement, for guaranteeing the highest possible availability of the service that is provided and billed. The co-existence with other applications that the customer can manage autonomously must not jeopardize the quality of the service provided, and much less so the co-existence with other applications over which the operator has direct control.
There thus arises the need to implement mechanisms that will guarantee the so-called “Quality of Service” (QoS), i.e., the possibility of guaranteeing the availability (reliability over time) of the service according to what has been agreed upon in the contract with the customer not only as regards the part of network dedicated to transport and access, but also as regards the part of network over which the operator has much less control, namely, the home network.
A solution is disclosed in US 2002/138613, which proposes follow-up notification of availability of requested application service and bandwidth between client(s) and server(s) over any network, in particular controlling service and bandwidth on a network that may provide orderly service delivery to client machines that request a service. In particular, this document discloses a method for providing orderly service delivery to clients over a network, comprising the steps of requesting data from a location, and, if a denial is received, notifying a particular client of availability.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,664 discloses a method for monitoring and meeting customer bandwidth demand in operational IP data networks, based on comparison of mean access router uplink utilization to a prescribed threshold value that is computed based upon granular measurements of uplink utilization. This provides an indication of whether customer demand is met with a statistical confidence. Further, the actually measured access router uplink utilization can be used to make a predictive assessment of whether to provision a new customer on the access router without adversely affecting existing customers.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,704,289 discloses a method for monitoring service availability and maintaining customer bandwidth in a connectionless (IP) data network, based on measure of network accessibility and network continuity (in Defects Per Million) via an accessibility measurement instrumentation device and a continuity measurement instrumentation device. The accessibility and continuity measurements are combined via a mechanism to yield a service unavailability measure that is then compared to a threshold value, representing the applicable customer unavailable bandwidth specified under a service level agreement specification. If the actual service unavailability exceeds the allowable unavailable customer bandwidth under the service level agreement, then an event correlation device will correlate the service unavailability measure with network fault and performance alarm information from network alarms to establish a root cause. Once the route cause is established, a trouble ticket system generates a trouble ticket to facilitate network restoration.
The Applicant observes that none of the above-described solutions provides a user with the perception of the availability of the service that he/she is trying to access. Moreover, the Applicant notes that all the above documents describe operations and functionalities to be applied along the network and do not involve the user's destination devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,131,046 proposes altering displayed keys to indicate availability of service for a communications apparatus. In particular, this document discloses a communications apparatus which has a man/machine interface to prevent or dissuade a user from performing a wasteful calling operation. In one implementation, the communications apparatus is suitable for transmission and reception and includes a display unit for displaying a content associated with a communication operation, a detector for checking whether a communication is available based upon a reception signal, and a display controller for inhibiting the unit from displaying the content when the communication is unavailable.
The Applicant observes that in this solution the customer has not the perception of the available quality of the communication that he/she will have at his/her disposal.
Moreover, the Applicant observes that this document provides a solution dedicated to portable telephone communication systems, which is not suitable to be applied in a contest such that of residential or business data network systems. In fact, the technique described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,131,046 requires that the user's terminal (mobile phone) is constantly in reception of the RF signal sent by a radio base station in order to understand (through the intensity detected on a control channel) if communication is available. In a residential or business data network systems, when no service is being delivered to the system, there is no external signal that can be used to monitor the possible quality of service.
US 2005/0059350 A1 discloses a display terminal for use with a radio LAN system that allows for access to a number of different received data. The LAN system further comprises a base apparatus, which includes an antenna for radio communication with the display terminal. The display terminal is able to display a signal reception quality level, determined by calculation of the bit error rate per unit time of the received digital data. When the reception quality is low, the user can change the reception location.
The Applicant observes that the signal quality indication provided by the terminal is based only on the variability of the bit error rate of the received signal as a function of the position of the terminal itself. The technique proposed in US 2005/0059350 A1 is therefore unsuitable to provide indications on the availability and the possible quality of a service before the service is accessed, in particular in a system suitable to deliver different telecommunication services to a plurality of residential apparatuses connected to a same gateway.